Conspiracy Theories: The Fluoride Con

Since the 1950s, many authorities in the United States and others around the world have added fluoride to water supplies in a large-scale public health drive to reduce tooth decay levels. The World Health Organisation, the British Government, the American Dental Association and many other bodies insist that fluoridating drinking water reduces tooth decay and does not cause health problems.

What the theorists say:

The evidence supporting fluoridation is severely flawed. Although some research is now dated, and more recent studies generally favour fluoridation, there are findings that call the validity of such research into question and suggest that children, as an example, are consuming too much fluoride. Sceptics point to claims that scientists who speak out against the pro-fluoride establishment are bullied or pressured into changing their findings.

Even at a relatively low concentration, fluoride has been linked to bone-density loss, cancer, poisoning and dental problems. Toxic lead concentrations in drinking water have been traced back to the presence of fluoride which strips the protective coating in lead pipes. Since most of the fluoride added to public water supplies is produced as a by-product of industries such as aluminium and steel processing and fertiliser manufacture, it is a pollutant laden with toxic substances such as arsenic, lead and other heavy metals.

If fluoridation has questionable health benefits – and may actually be toxic – why is the establishment keen for us to believe otherwise? Because of big business. Since the 1930s, industrial giants such as US Steel and the Aluminium Company of America (ALCOA) started to run into trouble with accusations of damaging pollution leading to ruinous lawsuits. Fluoride was a ‘problem’ pollutant, linked to everything from contaminated farmland to wholesale health calamities. Such as the notorious 1948 Donora Death Fog – a pall of polluted air that killed 20 and poisoned thousands of residents in Donora, Pennsylvania. Handling their fluoride by-products properly and cleaning up the contaminated areas would have cost billions of dollars, while opening the companies up to cripplin union actions.

Instead, they marketed fluoride as a public health benefit. At the time, there was a lot of interest in findings that people living in areas with natural water fluoridation seemed to suffer less from tooth decay, leading to the first suggestions that artificial fluoridation might be beneficial. The US Public Health Service was in favour of this proposal, but who was in charge of the FSA? None other than Oscar R Ewing, former top lawyer for ALCOA.

The Official Story?

Pro-fluoridation voices argue that studies, old and new, do not prove it is a health threat, and that there is plenty of evidence to show a marked increase in dental well-being across two generations; also that anti-fluoridation research tends to be characterised by poor science.

Should you be paranoid?

Not overtly so. According to Robert Carton of the US Environmental Protection Agency, “Fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century, if not of all time.” With claims such as this, it is hard not to see the establishment’s reluctance to question the fluoride orthodoxy as, at best, a sever case of inertia – an unwillingness to admit error. To believe the more lurid claims that the establishment is colluding with big business in marketing poisonous pollution as medicine to avoid a large-scale clean up, you would have to believe that the elite would put profit before public interest. In an era of Enron, who could believe such a thing?